Why 24 bit audio and anything over 48k is not only worthless, but bad for music.

[bigshot]

I'll try to explain what I'm saying concisely...

Gregorio (if I can speak for him) was pointing out that realism wasn't a goal in the miking and sound mixing of commercial music. The goal is to creatively build a sound experience that's more expressive and organized of a statement than a bald capture. He referred to the fine art photorealist movement as being a failure, because it doesn't do what art is supposed to do... create a visual experience that's more expressive and organized of a statement than a photograph meticulously rendered in paint on masonite.

The example of easel painting vs technical illustration is another similar example. And animation techniques used by a character animator creating a believable performance as opposed to a effects artist comping Spiderman into a live action backplate naturally is similar as well. The former is a creative process that involves aesthetic choices, exaggeration of style or caricature, and expression of a personal statement or performance. The latter is a technical exercise.

There are technicians who do effects animation and technical illustration. Theirs is a matter of skill and craftsmanship in copying reality. And there are artists who use their medium to make creative statements of their own. Two different things- hands and brains. Copying reality is for technicians. Conveying ideas is for artists.

Gregorio's point was that engineering music is not simply a technical exercise. It's a creative process. A good sound engineer is an artist in sound the same way that a fine art painter is an artist in rendering in paint, and a character animator is an artist in expressing personality in drawings, puppets or CG models. None of these are purely technicians, although their job may have technical aspects.

 

[Davesrose]

I'll try to explain what I'm saying concisely...

Gregorio (if I can speak for him) was pointing out that realism wasn't a goal in the miking and sound mixing of commercial music. The goal is to creatively build a sound experience that's more expressive and organized of a statement than a bald capture. He referred to the fine art photorealist movement as being a failure, because it doesn't do what art is supposed to do... create a visual experience that's more expressive and organized of a statement than a photograph meticulously rendered in paint on masonite.

The example of easel painting vs technical illustration is another similar example. And animation techniques used by a character animator creating a believable performance as opposed to a effects artist comping Spiderman into a live action backplate naturally is similar as well. The former is a creative process that involves aesthetic choices, exaggeration of style or caricature, and expression of a personal statement or performance. The latter is a technical exercise.

There are technicians who do effects animation and technical illustration. Theirs is a matter of skill and craftsmanship in copying reality. And there are artists who use their medium to make creative statements of their own. Two different things- hands and brains. Copying reality is for technicians. Conveying ideas is for artists.

Gregorio's point was that engineering music is not simply a technical exercise. It's a creative process. A good sound engineer is an artist in sound the same way that a fine art painter is an artist in rendering in paint, and a character animator is an artist in expressing personality in drawings, puppets or CG models. None of these are purely technicians, although their job may have technical aspects.

Things may have gotten convoluted because we all have been having our own interpretations of 71 dB's statement of photorealism in visual applications (what that means with painting, photography, or 3D graphics). You claimed that character animation isn't supposed to look natural and isn't used with VFX studios. With my actual experience with photography and 3D animation, I have found quite the opposite. You claim Ray Harryhausen was an actual artist for interpreting movement on an inanimate maquette, yet a 3D animator interpreting motion for a 3D character (be it Spiderman, a lion, a Marvel supervillian, etc) somehow is not an animator or an artist. With the budgets and rosters for movies, productions tend to hire out work to each VFX studio for each shot. I've noticed certain studios are considered the top ones for certain types of shots. Digital Domain is a studio that has been considered top notch for their character animation (where, for example, you can't motion capture a dragon: it's almost completely hand animated and referenced from real life animals). Character animation can incorporate technical aspects. Like their work for Benjamin Button: where they painted Brad Pitt's face with green florescent powder to get a dense motion capture particle cloud. They also scanned his face in 3D and took photos at all angles in different light. But they still had to use artists to model and age his face, as well as animators to clean or exaggerate motion to make it look natural.

Right now AI is starting to be incorporated more with animation. The technique known as deep fakes is really maturing: but studios will still go in and implore artists to do some adjustments. Many workflows that Pixar has is the same as ILM's special effects: the main difference is that their characters stay stylized. There's always been a give and take with the technical and artistry. Just look at Pixar's history. It was founded with the computer scientists who were first recruited by Lucas/ILM. They developed software tools that all animation packages use now. As a company, they first started by selling workstations and their own rendering software. In order to get more promotion, they started creating animated shorts for Siggraph, and started employing traditional animators (who learned the software to translate cell animation techniques to 3D). They had already developed tools and techniques before going on to a feature length movie.

Every production, whether it's intended for VFX or animated film, has a mix of artistry and technical applications. There are artists driving the modeling, lighting, shading, rendering, and compositing to make a VFX shot look natural. Similar processes are used with animated movies, and they'll employ technical aspects for simulation or a faster workflow (take for example, Finding Nemo: which had a specific water simulation). Their budgets are high enough that they have teams of artists and 3D programmers.

 

[bigshot]

Personality and performance is the difference between character animation and VFX. Character animators are actors, not art directors. The difference is all about creating life, not just imitating it. With CG there are people in the pipeline who are technicians who do lighting and textures and that sort of thing, and people who are artists who do performance and cinematic staging and stuff like that. Both sides work together.

The same is true of audio engineering. There are technical engineers who do calibration and machine maintenance, and creative engineers who do mixing and recording. (The Germans call creative engineers Tonmeisters I think.)

Gregorio's point was that recording and mixing isn't just capturing reality. It's creating something greater than real. Audiophiles don't always realize that. They think that the quality they hear is because of the equipment or file format. They think that mixing obliterates clarity, but the exact opposite is true.

 

[WoodyLuvr]

Personality and performance is the difference between character animation and VFX. Character animators are actors, not art directors. The difference is all about creating life, not just imitating it. With CG there are people in the pipeline who are technicians who do lighting and textures and that sort of thing, and people who are artists who do performance and cinematic staging and stuff like that. Both sides work together.

The same is true of audio engineering. There are technical engineers who do calibration and machine maintenance, and creative engineers who do mixing and recording. (The Germans call creative engineers Tonmeisters I think.)

Gregorio's point was that recording and mixing isn't just capturing reality. It's creating something greater than real. Audiophiles don't always realize that. They think that the quality they hear is because of the equipment or file format. They think that mixing obliterates clarity, but the exact opposite is true.

Funny, I know next to nothing about animation but I clearly understood (in his very first posts regarding such) that @bigshot was referring to "personality vs performance" as he just again clarified.

I also, clearly understood this analogy he was making in reference to audio engineering in supporting the point made by @gregorio. So where is the real argument here? What am I missing? Is this a spill over from another thread perhaps?

Not meaning this to be a slight in any way, shape, or form but rather a serious question about social media and how people read these days... are people simply skimming over written text (guessing the intended response) rather than actually fully reading every word, comprehending what was written, and then reflecting upon what has been written? Or are we no longer really reading anymore?

Maybe I am showing my advanced age but I am seeing increasing amounts of miscommunication these days between folks textually... and even verbally where people are no longer active listeners but rather inactive (passive) listeners who have become active interrupters and/or simply are not paying attention to what is being said as they are too busy trying to form a cute retort.

 

[Davesrose]

Personality and performance is the difference between character animation and VFX. Character animators are actors, not art directors. The difference is all about creating life, not just imitating it. With CG there are people in the pipeline who are technicians who do lighting and textures and that sort of thing, and people who are artists who do performance and cinematic staging and stuff like that. Both sides work together.

.

Gregorio's point was that recording and mixing isn't just capturing reality. It's creating something greater than real. Audiophiles don't always realize that. They think that the quality they hear is because of the equipment or file format. They think that mixing obliterates clarity, but the exact opposite is true.

Again, you don't think that the animators doing hand animation for a 3D dragon, Spiderman, Thanos, The Hulk, a lion, etc are not striving for personality and performance?? It really floors me that you don't acknowledge the artistry that VFX does have to employ. With the previous reference to hand animation: that is entirely done by artists. There are also digital artists who do 3D modeling by hand. Texture artists painting skin textures, sub-dermal layers, building textures. There are compositing artists deciding how much intensity or color balance to use with different layers to make the shot look natural. They stay artists: the team is large enough that there are others who consider technical aspects (like supplying artists with toolsets that are intuitive or creating particle simulation engines).

If we get back to analogies of music reproduction: both are related in that they are mediums which are not the same as the human perception. There is artistry employed to filter or compose for something that is "natural" or "pleasing" to whatever medium you are listening/watching.

 

[bigshot]

Yeah, I tried to get the concept across. Oh well. I love talking about animation. I did a lecture online about it just this evening. But that's a subject for a different forum.

The only point that matters is that commercially recorded music isn't intended to sound natural or realistic. It's designed from the ground up to sound better than real.

 

[71 dB]

It's designed from the ground up to sound better than real.

So why are there bad recordings then? The intent is one thing. Making it happen is another, and that seems to be the hard part.

 

[Davesrose]

So where is the real argument here? What am I missing? Is this a spill over from another thread perhaps?

With my interactions between bigshot, we have had a bit of a history when it comes to visuals, home theater, and just plain semantics. He can be set in his preconceived notions he has no experience with (in this thread, 3D animation workflows....in a previous exchange, it was matrix Dolby Surround schemes).

Yeah, I tried to get the concept across. Oh well. I love talking about animation. I did a lecture online about it just this evening. But that's a subject for a different forum.

The only point that matters is that commercially recorded music isn't intended to sound natural or realistic. It's designed from the ground up to sound better than real.

At one point you pointed me to your animation group's website. I do appreciate 2D animation techniques...and I assume that's what your lecture was about. If we were to meet in person over drinks, I'm sure we could become friends and have a good evening of talking cinema and animation. I got more into charcter animation while learning about 3D animation. Growing up, I was into photography, drawing, model making, and learning about (what was then model/optical compositing VFX). Sorry to be blunt, but given that you're so flippant about VFX, I doubt your lecture had anything to do with 3D animation workflows.

Given that music is in a real environment, I'm not sure how it can sound better than real. Since we're getting back to semantics, I think we're both saying that music engineering (or visual editing) are taking sources that actually are different from human perception. All media have content creators who subjectively edit to convey something that hopefully elicits a response. You were flippant about the photorealist painters: while I thought Chuck Close was cheating in method when he projected photos on a very large canvas, it still does give an impression to have a face on a wall that big. With mediums that I work with, I think engineering for music is more like photography. The only difference being that digital sound is now at a point that it exceeds all the specifications for humnan hearing, while photography has a way to go (as we have two eyes that scan a scene and can have a higher dynamic range than any produced medium). A sound engineer's intent is making something that sounds good for any intended medium (and that it sounds "natural" as far as hearing the artist's performance). It's similar with photography, where at the very least you have to consider the intended delivery resolution. But a proficient photographer also knows about dynamic range, and may have to do quite a bit of editing to adjust the tonal curves of an image to make the final image look "right".

 

[bigshot]

So why are there bad recordings then?

Men are fallible creatures. The fates are not always on their side.

Sheist happens.

My lecture was about all kinds of animation. It was about animation as an expressive art form with roots that go back hundreds of years.

Re: how can a recording sound better than real?

If you hear a musical performance in real life, you hear it from one perspective and in whatever acoustic that particular recording venue happens to have. Things that are closer to you are louder, and ones that are further away are quieter. The loud sounds block the quiet ones. Captured live, musicians make mistakes and don't always mesh quite right. It sounds natural and real, but not great.

A recordist places microphones to capture each instrument at its best. Some get close miked, some more distant. Sometimes there are sound barriers between the loud instruments like the drums and the quieter instruments to maintain separation. The mics are pointed at specific parts of the instrument to pick up the sound in the optimal way. The recording is tracked with one performer playing to a previous recording of another performer, so the best takes from each can be used. A sound mixer optimizes each element in the mix, adjusting them in volume and timbre so they all read in a balanced way. He carves out openings in the sound so quiet things can come through. He adjusts the equalization so there is a nice balance of frequencies and tonality of sound. He creates a customized balance of amplitude that changes from moment to moment to make each note follow the perfect dynamics. He applies compression to make consonants in vocals clear, increasing the understandability of the lyrics. He creates an ambient environment for the sound using digital delays and reverbs. He edits different takes together and punches in pickups to create flawless performances that perfectly express the intent of the musicians.

It takes hours to mix a song well. The engineer, producer and artist go over every inch of it, adjusting here and there until it reflects the best that is possible. If you compare a capture of the performance made live with a single mic and no mixing to a fully produced sound mix, it's like night and day. The mix is a creative part of the music. If it does its job well it presents the song at its best and the listener doesn't even register all the work that went into getting it there.

Yes, sometimes mixes are bad. But the purpose of recording and mixing is to create a musical experience that is better organized, clearer, more expressive and better sounding than just sticking a mic in front of a band and just capturing it.

 

[Davesrose]

Men are fallible creatures. The fates are not always on their side.

Sheist happens.

Well in hind sight, it's always easy to blame human judgement. But it does still take effort to do proper miking at conventional bit depths. Less so with 32 bit, and an argument I've seen when it comes to journalism when you might want to gather something different at a later date. I might have to invoke photography again: you might have environments or sources with higher dynamic range or resolution that at a later date, you want to source from. Anyways, from an archival standpoint (which say for movies that have been scanned at 4K formats for years) its worth it (they also save a new film print as well).

 

[bigshot]

You can't change the perspective of proper miking by just adjusting the volume. Secondary distance cues are very important and there's no one perspective that works for all instruments. I'm not talking about resolution here. I'm talking about creative choices that go together to create a sound picture, just like a painter creates a picture with composition, color, texture, form, light and shade and shapes; or a character animator creates a performance with caricature, exaggeration, flow, rhythm, line of action, expression and gesture.

It's about creativity, not technical accuracy.

 

[Davesrose]

You can't change the perspective of proper miking by just adjusting the volume. Secondary distance cues are very important and there's no one perspective that works for all instruments. I'm not talking about resolution here. I'm talking about creative choices that go together to create a sound picture, just like a painter creates a picture with paint, or a character animator creates a performance with caricature, exaggeration, flow, rhythm, expression and gesture.

??Well there's mic placement: but again, 32bit recording gives you sound levels you might want at a later date. When you say perspective, I think of mic placement, which is not the same as dynamic range or resolution.

You might be trying to beleaguer the same point you keep going on about how "creative choices" is just for music engineers or the animators you deem the correct character animators (who do not include the VFX artists who hand animate all the characters we see in movies).

**edit: wow, I see you seriously added to your post "Men are fallible creatures. The fates are not always on their side." (including a bit about what your animation lecture was). As far as animation: maybe what it was in the past, but again, no 3D workflows from which now you're judging. Hind sight...

 

[bigshot]

Perspective in mic placement is close miked as opposed to distant. Like an acoustic guitar close miked so you can hear every detail and the fingers on the strings as opposed to distant miking where it turns into a rhythm guitar jangle. The distance from the mic affects more than just volume. The timbre changes too. Those are all creative choices.

I guess you don't see the difference between animation as a creative medium and animation as a technique.

 

[Davesrose]

Perspective in mic placement is close miked as opposed to distant. Like an acoustic guitar close miked so you can hear every detail and the fingers on the strings as opposed to distant miking where it turns into a rhythm guitar jangle. The distance from the mic affects more than just volume. The timbre changes too. Those are all creative choices.

I guess you don't see the difference between animation as a creative medium and animation as a technique.

When I say perspective is about mic placement...it's somehow different than close vs distant mic placement??

I guess you still keep not understanding that 3D animation (whether animated film or VFX medium) are both creative. Jesus...this is just like the last thread where I kept supplying you literature about Dolby Pro Logic II and Dolby Surround, and you kept refusing to understand how they're the progression with matrix surround. You accept Ray Harryhausen as a special effects artist who is a creative character animator: I really don't understand why you can't accept his decendants....Phil Tippet, his 3D studio, and all other 3D character animators who look up to them as all the same school are not the same.

 

[71 dB]

If you hear a musical performance in real life, you hear it from one perspective and in whatever acoustic that particular recording venue happens to have. Things that are closer to you are louder, and ones that are further away are quieter. The loud sounds block the quiet ones. Captured live, musicians make mistakes and don't always mesh quite right. It sounds natural and real, but not great.

However, people think it is enough (in life performances). Why isn't the same enough with home play? Why do we have to make home audio less natural and real, but "greater"? I'm not saying the conventions aren't the best they can be, only questioning things. That's my personality. I stop to think if the way we do things is the best way to do them. How should a recording listened at home sound compared to life music? Not a 100 % trivial question in my opinion.

A recordist places microphones to capture each instrument at its best. Some get close miked, some more distant. Sometimes there are sound barriers between the loud instruments like the drums and the quieter instruments to maintain separation. The mics are pointed at specific parts of the instrument to pick up the sound in the optimal way. The recording is tracked with one performer playing to a previous recording of another performer, so the best takes from each can be used. A sound mixer optimizes each element in the mix, adjusting them in volume and timbre so they all read in a balanced way. He carves out openings in the sound so quiet things can come through. He adjusts the equalization so there is a nice balance of frequencies and tonality of sound. He creates a customized balance of amplitude that changes from moment to moment to make each note follow the perfect dynamics. He applies compression to make consonants in vocals clear, increasing the understandability of the lyrics. He creates an ambient environment for the sound using digital delays and reverbs. He edits different takes together and punches in pickups to create flawless performances that perfectly express the intent of the musicians.

This all sounds great, but in reality it is not this "rosy." Also, different genres and types of music employ these things differently. The above applies better to movie soundtracks than recordings of classical music for example, at least in my experience.

It takes hours to mix a song well.

Tell me something I don't know! I have been mixing my new track since November I think. Sure, I only mix for an hour or so on about 2 days per week, but that's dozens of hours anyway and the track isn't mixed fully yet. My heath problems have prevented me from mixing faster. It is all my hobby, so no deadlines.

The engineer, producer and artist go over every inch of it, adjusting here and there until it reflects the best that is possible.

Yeah, but the violinist will pay attention to his/her violin playing on a Violin Concerto rather than the whole piece. The bigger star he/she is the more his/her word matters in the production. If you want to hear the soloist Violin part of a Violin Concerto, listen to a recording played by a big star Violinist, but if you want to hear a more balanced take of the whole concerto, listen to a recording played by a less known (but good) violinist.

If you compare a capture of the performance made live with a single mic and no mixing to a fully produced sound mix, it's like night and day. The mix is a creative part of the music. If it does its job well it presents the song at its best and the listener doesn't even register all the work that went into getting it there.

I am not proposing not to mix recordings. I am wondering HOW recordings should be mixed. How different from the "real thing" can/should it be? What things should be "tinkered" the most and what aspects the least?

Yes, sometimes mixes are bad. But the purpose of recording and mixing is to create a musical experience that is better organized, clearer, more expressive and better sounding than just sticking a mic in front of a band and just capturing it.

In my opinion the worst classical music recording I own taking into account the technology available at the time of production is a CD of music by Christian Geist (1650-1711). The CD is named "Spirit of Geist - Royal Concertos" and it was recorded 2003 in Sweden for Daphne label and performed by Capella Redivina with period instruments. The sound on that CD is so bad that it is hard to enjoy the music at all. "Better organized, clearer, more expressive and better sounding than just sticking a mic in front of a band" are not the attributes I'd use together with this recording.

The problem of bad recordings is relevant when it comes to more obscure composers and works. There aren't dozens and dozens of recordings of this music to choose the best ones. This is not Beethoven's fifth Piano Concerto. This particular recording was made possible through the financial support of The University of Uppsala, Matista AB, Åmells Möbler AB and ANT, Advanced Nuclear Technology AB. Too bad all that money got "wasted" on a nearly unlistenable recordings. It is not the music nor the performance. It is the abysmal recording and mixing. Is it possible to have a recording/mixing "workflow model" to follow to prevent this kind of "tragedies"?